[philwebster]

With regards to FileVault for Mac, some friends who used to work as Geniuses at the Apple Store have mentioned having to request special software from corporate that would fix or recover FileVault in some way - they weren't clear and said it was not something they were supposed to talk about. Obviously I'd take the info with a grain of salt, but based on the news lately...

[nwh]

I had an conversation regarding FileVault with the geniuses recently too.

    > Oh we see [your MacBook] has a password, would you be able to write it down here?
    Haha, nope!
    > Any, uh, reason not to?  
    Nope. 

From a conversation later on, apparently not many people opt not to give up their keys. I'm not sure why they pushed me to give it up either, the geniuses know full well that they can just boot their diagnostics disk without the password anyway.

Bear in mind that the default setup for Apple's FileVault also sends a copy of the encryption key to Apple too (associated with your AppleID), where presumably there is access granted to the US government also (willing or unwilling).

[46Bit]

> Bear in mind that the default setup for Apple's FileVault also sends a copy of the encryption key to Apple too (associated with your AppleID), where presumably there is access granted to the US government also (willing or unwilling).

If anyone else is curious about this see the recovery key sections on http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4790